An unofficial, eclectic, mostly tangential, view of aspiring devotee life.
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Cows may come, cows may go, but the bull is always here.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Creating Illusion

Here is an example of messing with the optical mind. If someone has enough time and creative energy, they can create convincing illusions, inside our empirical realm. Actually, the whole world is an illusion, not in the sense that it doesn't exist, but in that we take it for one thing and it is another. It is reality versus Reality. Temporary versus eternal. The illusion is we think it will last as it is, and that it is all that is.

It would be a mistake to ignore reality, that is only another kind of illusion. I mean ignore it in the sense of "I don't need to floss my teeth because this is all temporary." That sort of reasoning is a young (usually) person's misapplication of the concept of illusion. While it is true we are not our body, our body IS our body and needs care. So floss your teeth, your future self will thank you for it.

To see several photos of real illusions in rooms like the above, and to see how it was done, click here.

A devotee should not see anything as being separate from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna. Ether, fire, air, water, earth, the sun and other luminaries, all living beings, the directions, trees and other plants, the rivers and oceans -- whatever a devotee experiences he should consider to be an expansion of Krsna.
Thus seeing everything that exists within creation as the body of the Supreme Lord, Hari, the devotee should offer his sincere respects to the entire expansion of the Lord's body.

Rabindranath Tagore:

A mind all logic
is like a knife all blade.
The hand that uses it will bleed.